The present invention relates to windmills and particularly to a windmill of improved efficiency for generating electrical power or for driving mechanically various types of rotary apparatus such as pumps, saws, winches, and the like.
Modern windmills have not yet become economically competitive with other sources of power, except in isolated instances. One reason for this is that the cost of the required structure per unit of power generated is too high.
Since power generated varies as the cube of the wind speed, one effective way to reduce unit costs is to add some fixed structure which increases the speed of the wind past the rotor. This is easy to do if the wind blows from only one direction, but that is not usually the case. Therefore, a fixed omnidirectional speed-increasing structure is needed.